Great Britain Survives, But Salmond Goes

Alex Salmond on the last day of campaigning before Scotland’s independence referendum.

Photograph by Andrew Milligan/PA Wire via AP

On the morning after a major vote, it is always dangerous to say anything too definitive about its long-term significance. History has a way of making instant punditry look foolish. Nevertheless, a number of things stand out about Scotland’s decision to reject independence. To begin with, it was a more emphatic “no” than seemed likely a week or two ago. And, in the immediate aftermath of this defeat for the Scottish National Party, which had been campaigning for a “yes” vote, Alex Salmond, the party’s leader, announced on Friday that he would resign from his post as Scotland’s First Minister.

Despite the "no" vote, Salmond’s decision to quit came as a bit of a shock. Although his side didn’t win, the canny fifty-nine-year-old Salmond, who worked as an economist before going into politics, brought Scotland closer to independence than anybody in the past three hundred years. Rather than staying on to press for more devolution of power to the Scottish Parliament, which the British government has promised to deliver, he indicated that, come November, he would step down as party leader and as leader of the Scottish government. “I believe that in this new exciting situation, redolent with possibility, party, parliament and country would benefit from new leadership,” Salmond said in a statement.

The referendum removed the prospect of any breakup in Great Britain for the next few years, perhaps even for the next couple of decades. “I think a referendum is a once-in-a-generation process—that’s my opinion,” Salmond told the BBC. Others, including many of the “yes” voters, may disagree with that analysis. For now, though, the result has resolved any doubts about the United Kingdom’s continued role in international institutions, such as NATO, the G7, and the United Nations. That explains why President Obama and many other international leaders welcomed the result.

However, the "no" vote doesn’t fully resolve the independence issue—far from it. As I noted in an earlier post, the so-called devo-max option—which would grant the Scottish Parliament more power over taxes, spending, and other policy issues, and which many Scots are now expecting to be implemented—raises tricky questions about the future of Scottish M.P.s at Westminster, and, by extension, the future of the union. If Scotland becomes effectively a self-ruling country, what sort of representation should it have in the national Parliament?

Going forward, that is one of the questions that Salmond’s current deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, who is the favorite to replace him as the party leader and First Minister, will be faced with. Another one is this: How do you govern a country in which forty-five per cent of the residents have said that they want to be independent?

The ten-point margin—fifty-five per cent voted “no,” forty-five per cent voted “yes”—was considerably larger than the polls had indicated in the days before the vote. (Most of them had put “no” about four points ahead.) It is tempting to conclude that the dire warnings issued about the economic consequences of a "yes" vote scared some nationalists into putting their pocketbooks before their hearts, thus swinging the vote back to the “no” side. That would be a good story. However, the evidence from one exit poll in particular fails to support this interpretation.

The poll, which was commissioned by Michael Ashcroft, the Tory businessman and politician, showed that almost three-quarters of the “no” voters had known how they would vote pretty much all along: only about a quarter of them made up their minds this year. The figures for “yes” voters were very different. More than half said that they had decided how to vote since the start of this year, and more than a third said that they had come to a decision within the past month. If this finding is accurate, it suggests a basic narrative for the campaign—that most of the late deciders were on the pro-independence side, but that there weren’t enough of them to change the result.

In terms of how the vote was distributed across Scotland, the pro-independence side did best in urban working-class neighborhoods, and the “no”s were strongest in small towns and rural areas, particularly in the south of the country. Glasgow and its environs, Scotland’s biggest metropolitan area, voted in favor of leaving Great Britain. So did Dundee, an industrial seaport on the Firth of Tay.

In the rest of the country, including in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, the second- and third-largest cities, a majority of participants voted "no." Even in Highland, home to the fiery army that defeated the English at the Battle of Bannockburn, in the fourteenth century, the “yes” vote was under fifty per cent. Nowhere, though, did it dip below a third.

Hailing the result from outside 10 Downing Street, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, said that it was time for the “United Kingdom to come together, and to move forward.” In promising to deliver, by January, draft legislation on further devolution of power to Scotland, he acknowledged that the referendum had raised fundamental political and constitutional issues that couldn’t be swept aside. “It is absolutely right that a new and fair settlement for Scotland should be accompanied by a new and fair settlement that applies to all parts of our United Kingdom.”

That was widely taken as a hint that changes will be forthcoming from Westminster to limit the ability of Scottish M.P.s to influence legislation affecting England, and to give more power to English M.P.s. Things may not stop there. And, with a general election due next spring, Cameron and his colleagues will be under pressure to placate the English nationalists, whom the right-wing U.K. Independence Party is busy whipping up. As Salmond and the “Scottish question” recede from the headlines, the “English question” could well replace them.